If the force carriers for ordinary matter are called bosons...

Then would the force carriers for SIMPs be called...SIMPsons?

No, to compete in price against anyone you only need assets. That can be money, or it can be tangible assets, such as rocket parts that remain in serviceable condition after a launch. Probably no one here will like it, but under current law, even "intellectual property" counts as an asset.

I'm sure the solar panels from defunct rovers could provide at least a trickle charge.

And he can put a better charging station there later.

And then all the companies will rename their consumer plans, at the very least, "web" or "data" like the mobile companies do. And practically nobody will notice or care.

Yes, and all the stars in the sky would have collapsed, and we would have created black holes at H-bomb test sites.

There might be nuclear waste to worry about given stray neutrons, but gravitons aren't something I'm worried about.

I think he's referring to the Thirty Years' War.

The Thirty Years' War was a series of wars in Central Europe between 1618–1648. It was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history, and one of the longest...it gradually developed into a more general conflict involving most of the great powers of Europe....

I don't have cable or satellite, but I heard their picture quality is way worse than broadcast usually has been. This could just be evening the score.

Digital becoming twitchy isn't just because of transitioning to digital. It's also because they lowered the transmitter power.

The maximum power for DTV broadcast classes is also substantially lower; one-fifth of the legal limits for the former full-power analog services. This is because there are only eight different states in which an 8VSB signal can be in at any one moment; thus, like all digital transmissions, very little signal is required at the receiver in order to decode it.

So if you were watching an analog signal of the same power, you'd have a hard time making it out too.

From TFA that's not in TFS:

The company [Google] did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

This has to be one of the best use cases I've seen for wireless charging stations. Put one at every bus stop where it's practical. Just by sitting there, while letting people on and off or just waiting to get back on schedule, the bus can be recharging. Also, buses are long, so the density of power sent through the charging coils doesn't have to be as high as with a car.

Not an HTML tag. It needs to be some kind of metadata embedded in the image itself. There are places in various formats for these things; I guess we just need better tools to read and write them.

For instance with tanks, if you make them drive-by-wire and you make the computer control system small enough, you can just pull the computer when you're done with the tank and take it with you.

Of course, the enemy could counter this in several ways. They could jerry-rig the tank to work minimally without a control system, but it would not be nearly as effective. They could steal the control computer, but that's a security issue - the key components should be under lock and key and heavy guard. Or they could steal the control software and load it on a smartphone or something, but that's again a security issue. And all of these require more technical knowledge than hot-wiring a car.

I got a pair of good 7x50 binoculars. As a side-benefit besides astronomy, I call them my night-vision scopes. When I look through them at dusk at terrestrial objects, everything I see looks brighter! You won't see the landscape when it's pitch black, but it's a surprising difference for unpowered optics.

Let's assume you got a cheap telescope. What can you do to make it work better for you?

1. Get astronomy software. Someone else mentioned Stellarium; I guess that's the go-to PC software now. I don't know what's available for phones. But make sure it shows an object's altitude in degrees.
2. Get a red flashlight. I guess these days people use red LEDs; back when I was a kid the place to go was army surplus for those bent army flashlights with colored filters.
3. Get a protractor. It's cheap, it's plastic, it shows degrees, and it's probably on sale now for back-to-school.
4. Get a piece of thin string and a weight, such as a nut for a bolt.

Tie the piece of string through the center hole on the protractor, and tie the other end to the weight. Now tape the protractor to the body of the telescope, preferably along some piece that sticks out near the tripod so it's aligned properly. To get an object in the scope, find its current altitude on your astronomy software. Then tilt the scope so the string's position matches that altitude on the protractor, using the red flashlight to see the string and protractor. You might have to do some math to get the matching number on the protractor. (90-x degrees - see, kids, that's what math is good for!) Now you mostly have to pan the scope, which is usually easier than tilting.

One other idea that came to mind while writing this: Take the jack stand out of your car, tape it to one leg of the tripod, and you might be able to use that for fine tilt adjustments. I've never tried this idea, though.

Because there was no actual "hiatus". The poles were warming (on the surface, as opposed to 1,500m down) when the rest of the Earth wasn't. So this means global warming is actually accelerating by quite a bit.